It has long been suspected that “intrinsic biological differences” play a role in why different racial groups appear to have different risk levels for prostate cancer incidence and mortality.
A new study by Wang et al., just published in Nature Communications, has now given us some further insights into why this might be the case. The full text of the article is available on line … but it is hard to read and understand without a detailed background in genetics and molecular biology, so …
Basically what Wang et al. are telling us is that the ways in which pieces of ribonucleic acids (RNAs) get interconnected (“spliced together”) during various aspects of the biological growth and functioning of cells can be different for African Americans compared to Caucasians. This seems to have implications related to the risk for development of prostate cancers and, even more specifically, the risk for diagnosis with more aggressive subtypes of prostate cancer.
In the long run, this may have implications for being able to both identify such risks and also create new forms of treatment that are more specific to these subtypes of prostate cancer … but these clinical implications are still a long way away at the moment.
Filed under: Diagnosis, Living with Prostate Cancer, Management, Risk, Treatment | Tagged: biology, race, risk, RNA, splicing |
THE "NEW" PROSTATE CANCER INFOLINK 
Leave a Reply